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Chapter 2 Basking in the Museum, Staring at the Sun:

Aura, Ambience, and the Contemporary Sublime Introduction

To this (double) extent, one could say that the logic of the sublime is not to be

confused with either a logic of fiction or a logic of desire, that is, again, with

either a logic of representation (something in the place of something else) or a

logic of absence (of the thing that is lacking in its place). Fiction and desire,

at least in these classical functions, perhaps always frame and determine

aesthetics as such, all aesthetics. And the aesthetics of mere beauty, of the

pure self-adequation of presentation, with its incessant sliding into the

enjoyment of the self, indeed, arises out of fiction and desire.

~ Jean-Luc Nancy1

When Walter Benjamin writes about the aura in “The Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction,” we, as readers, can interpret the term in two ways.

2

1 “The Sublime Offering,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 37.

We

may take the aura at face value: a sensory emanation in excess of and yet bound to the

sited visual (art) object, the object’s situated presence. Or we may consider the aura

in light of Benjamin’s further discussion as an earmark of a far more complex

ambivalence about the modern age and the effects of industrial, mechanical, and

technological progress on visual art, film, reception, and creative production. In

translating aura as ambience in the televisual age, I, too, wish to take the term

2 In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968)

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ambience at face value as well as render it contextually complex. This chapter

explores the explicit, ambient pleasures of the televisual and the technological

through an in-depth consideration of Olafur Eliasson’s artistic oeuvre, particularly his

large-scale installation The Weather Project (2003-2004). Through my analyses, I

focus on the artist’s place in a well-established series of discourses on nature,

representation, illusion, beauty, and visual truth. I will also draw from this object-

based discussion to build a theory of the ambient through the ambiguous construct of

the contemporary sublime as a technological sublime.

In the above epigraph, Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to make a distinction

between the “logic of the sublime” and the ostensibly parallel but not equivalent

logics of fiction and desire. His parsing of these logics is both compelling and

imminently relevant to my argument in this chapter. On the one hand, Nancy

immediately disassociates the sublime from fiction, desire, absence, and

representation, simultaneously disavowing its equivalence with these terms and

marking its dependence on them. The logic of the sublime is “not to be confused

with” these other logics, and yet it is clearly close enough to them that this confusion

is probable, if not inevitable. Nancy demonstrates how the sublime is often defined by

what it is not, framed by a set of terms in which the sublime serves as both

counterpart and foil. On the other hand, Nancy implicitly aligns fiction and desire

with representation and absence respectively, setting up two perhaps unintentional

analogies. The first he makes obvious through his phrasing (“…that is, again…”):

fiction is to representation what desire is to absence. The second is more implicit,

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marked by Nancy’s parentheticals: “something in the place of something else”

(representation) corresponds with “the thing that is lacking in its place” (absence).

However, if absence is overcome by representation, is desire satisfied by fiction (i.e.

is fiction to desire what representation is to absence)? To answer in short, Nancy’s

analogies are not falsely matched, but they are imperfect. In other words—to borrow

from the well-known SAT formatting for analogical relationships—if one argues that

“hat is to head” what “scarf is to neck” what “mitten is to thumb,” the last analogy in

the set is neither wrong nor completely accurate. Something is missing, in this case

the fingers, making “mitten : hand” a more appropriate third analogy. Rather than try

to correct an imperfectly matched set, my aim in this chapter is to investigate the

potential incongruities in a series of analogical relationships. Is fiction to desire what

representation is to absence? Is truth to fiction what reality is to illusion? Is nature to

culture what humanity is to technology? The flaws inherent in these analogies, the

near-miss comparisons, reveal valuable information about their intersection and

application and open up a space for me to parse out a working definition of ambience.

By extension, my analysis will lead to an exploration of the relationship between

ambience and other salient terms in my argument, such as televisual pleasure, the

televisual gaze, and the technological sublime.

I define ambience like Nancy defines the sublime: both through what it is not

and through that which with it is intimately related. Tellingly, these are often the

same things. As I discussed briefly in Chapter 1, ambience is not an aura-equivalent,

and yet without Walter Benjamin’s conception of the aura, my theory of ambience

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would not be possible. Ambience is both like the aura and more than the aura—

linked by etymology but made distinctive through additional elements which “aura”

cannot accommodate. The aura, according to Benjamin, is that which “withers in the

age of mechanical reproduction.”3 When an object is broadcast and/or reproduced

beyond its situated time and place, “the quality of its presence is always depreciated.”

For example, Benjamin writes, “The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the

studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the

open air, resounds in the drawing room.”4 Mechanical reproduction allows the

viewer to encounter an object or performance under variable and numerous

circumstances, distorting and dispersing the “authentic” aspects of the object’s

physical presence in a specific space and time (i.e. the controlled environment of the

museum, the acoustic resonance of a music hall, or the sobering sanctity of a

cathedral’s grounds).5 Benjamin’s interrogation of the aura’s “withering” intersects

with two particular elements of my argument. Demonstrating the relevance of

technology’s expansive reach, he asserts that with the loss of the aura, plurality is

substituted for singularity; unique objects must make way for a multitude of

mechanical reproductions.6

3 “The Work of Art,” 221.

Benjamin also identifies the growing cultural presence of

and need for collective experiences as a central element of the aura’s dissolution:

4 “The Work of Art,” 220, 221. 5 “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” “The Work of Art,” 220 6 “The Work of Art,” 221.

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“Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective

experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the

past, and for the movie today.”7 He contrasts the modes of reception embodied by

the individual versus the “distracted mass”—the former is absorbed by the work of

art, whereas the latter absorbs it—and he identifies architecture as a primary example

of the latter function of reception; we perceive buildings as objects of habit, of lived-

in reality, rather than looking upon and contemplating them like paintings. 8

7 “The Work of Art,” 234-35.

Through

this analogy, both Minimalism and Eliasson’s environmental installations

complement Benjamin’s discussion of mass reception and collective experience.

Minimalist sculptures exemplify banal objects which approximate architecture; they

are anthropomorphic and viewers may approach them as part of their “lived-in

reality.” Eliasson’s work, as I will illustrate below, mimics environmental settings,

creating situations in which viewers can and should act. Television, as a medium of

habit and, often, distracted viewing, also resonates with this sense of spectatorial

immersion. However, simply identifying objects which fit into Benjamin’s model is a

specious diversion; my aim is not to reinforce the idea that the aura has withered in

the contemporary era. Rather, I assert that while Benjamin’s aura may have faded in

the wake of mechanical reproduction, ambience, as a new model of situated aesthetic

experience, has emerged in the age of the televisual.

8 “The Work of Art,” 239-40.

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Benjamin reveals the aura’s “withering” as foundational for the development

of film as a primary archetype of “reception in a state of distraction” in the

mechanical age.9 In an era during which mechanical equipment and technological

innovations saturate daily life, he argues that film “is incomparably more significant”

as an art form than painting because it brings its viewers an image devoid of the

trappings of the mechanical age (equipment, technology, etc.) so common to

everyday reality.10 Counter-intuitively, since film’s production requires all manner of

technological innovation, its illusory image may remain free from the mechanical

accessories of its creation, and this illusion is what we are “entitled to ask from a

work of art.”11

9 “The Work of Art,” 240.

Alternatively, in the age of the televisual, mechanical and digital

reproductive technologies play roles which are different and more pronounced than

earlier techniques. No longer concealable behind the camera, technology, its

manifestations, and its consequences suffuse the fabric of contemporary lived reality.

With ambient art, which Eliasson’s work exemplifies, the technological, industrial,

and mechanical aspects come to the fore, becoming part of and inseparable from the

aesthetic object. This flaunting of technology ostensibly draws in the spectator in a

seamless confluence of technology and object which renders moot the notion of the

object’s authenticity (vis-à-vis its reproducibility). Instead, the relationship between

the object and its viewer-subject becomes a singular experience above and beyond the

object’s own singularity as an object. Collective experience, what I will characterize

10 “The Work of Art,” 234. 11 “The Work of Art,” 234.

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more thoroughly in Chapter 3 through a discussion of “ambient communities,” is

essential to my conception of ambience.

I argue in Chapter 1 that the televisual gaze relies on the reciprocal effects of

the imagined bodies of fellow viewers—“I see myself seeing.” So, too, ambience

veers from its predecessor, the aura, through its incorporation of collective

involvement. Rather than a singular auratic object encountered by the few in “the

place where it happens to be,” ambient objects are encountered by the many who

experience them both individually and collectively, who are both absorbed and

absorb, who are both distracted and contemplative, and who may not experience a

singular object but will nevertheless take part in a singular experience.12

Ambience, as I render it, is specific to the televisual age. Inherently tied to the

term’s etymology are all the contemporary factors which influence the spectator’s

relationship to the visual object, whether it be an object of visual art (like Tony

Smith’s Die or Eliasson’s The Weather Project) or a television show like those I

consider in subsequent chapters. These factors include technological ubiquity, the

Minimalist

objects—through the use of industrial techniques, the insistence on participation, and

the cultivation of a televisual gaze—represent the beginning, but not the sole

exemplar, of ambience’s applicability as a term in reference to art. Eliasson’s work,

comparatively, does not epitomize the only other example of ambient art. It does,

however, illustrate a more developed, notably contemporary model of ambience,

signifying its continued expression in visual objects in the late 20th and 21st century.

12 “The Work of Art,” 220

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predominance of new media and global telecommunications, and the distractions of

an image-saturated, fast-paced visual landscape. This chapter confronts these

multivalent definitions of ambience and considers how ambience affects modes of

production, reception, and community in the televisual age. I propose an analogical

relationship between beauty and the sublime and aura and ambience in order to frame

my theorizing of ambience’s relationship to and relevance for an understanding of

televisual pleasure and the gaze in contemporary Western visual culture. This is not to

say that beauty and the aura are directly comparable, and neither are ambience and

the sublime, but that the oft-discussed and intensely theorized relationship between

beauty and the sublime can shed significant light on the relationship between the aura

and ambience beyond my brief attempts to do so above.

Predicting the Weather, Constructing The Weather Project

In the winter spanning the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, Eliasson’s

piece The Weather Project occupied the vast Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern

museum. The central feature of the installation was a semi-circle made up of

hundreds of lamps, which seemed, in their reflection on the mirrored ceiling above, to

form a huge glowing sun floating on the upper limit of the wall. To add to this effect,

he mechanized an internal climate system for the Hall, creating mist and allowing

currents of cold outside air to mingle with the museum’s own climate-controlled

environment. This combination of mechanized and natural air currents supported the

formation of fog, mist, and clouds which grew and dissipated in the space of the Hall

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over the course of each day. Most compelling was the reaction of the spectators, who

were often found basking on the museum floor in the heatless radiance of the artificial

light. In his “Best of 2003” review in Artforum, Daniel Birnbaum raves,

This synthetic, heliocentric cosmos is no doubt the artwork of the year.

Activating the space itself and involving the viewer both as a perceiving

subject and as a body among bodies (when I went to the Tate, hundreds of

people were on the floor, looking at themselves in the mirror on the ceiling),

Eliasson's installation reaffirms that great art can be popular. A cultic space

without a hint of New Age kitsch, his transformed Turbine Hall is majestic,

even—dare I say it?—sublime.13

Obligingly, Birnbaum’s enthusiastic review pinpoints three aspects of The Weather

Project which make it particularly germane to my analysis. First, the work’s

emphasis on “the viewer both as a perceiving subject and as a body among bodies”

supports my previous construction of the televisual gaze: the viewer recognizes

herself as a scopic subject through her physical and visual interaction with the art

object and by locating herself in a field of other spectators. Second, the work’s

popularity serves as a valuable foundation for a discussion about mass reception and

the tension between criticality, pleasure, and visual entertainment. Third, and perhaps

most significant, The Weather Project enacts the contemporary sublime, addressing

the technological urge to imitate and improve on nature and holding the viewer

captive in the hypnotic allure of a false sun’s fluorescent glow. It thereby articulates

13 Artforum 42 (4) (Dec 2003): 124.

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ways we are beholden to the experience of technological radiance, even without the

associated benefits offered by nature, such as warmth, health, and the potential for

growth.

The Tate commissioned The Weather Project as part of its Unilever Series,

which sponsors one artist each year to fill the immense, post-industrial Turbine Hall.

This huge concrete foyer, just inside the Tate’s entrance, used to be the turbine room

of Bankside Power Station, the previous incarnation of the Tate Modern building.14

Eliasson did not have a work in mind when he was approached by the Tate, but

developed the project based on his ongoing interest in the weather, spectatorship,

subjectivity, and systems of mediation. Believing that many people mistake weather

for an unmediated natural phenomenon instead of a mediated social structure,

Eliasson aimed to address this conundrum by comparing the site of the museum as a

cultural environment with the weather as an acculturated phenomenon. Although we

often imagine the weather as a wholly natural process, it is in fact inextricably bound

to culture and to civilization—our cities are built to fit surrounding climates and our

lives are lived in accordance with the weather.15

14 Although Eliasson and the Tate’s curators do not explicitly state as much, the confluence of the artist’s light-oriented work and his technological mimicry of nature become doubly-relevant in relation to the Tate’s previous life as a power station.

Our constant need to predict the

weather in order to respond accordingly in our day-to-day lives is simply a more

feasible alternative to our desire to control and manipulate the climate whenever and

however we see fit. In his essay “Museums are Radical,” published in The Weather

15 Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project [catalog], ed. Susan May (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 130-31.

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Project catalog, Eliasson writes: “As long as we have had art history, we have had the

discussion about whether art should be referred to as a representational system

(reflecting society like a mirror) or whether it is an integrated part of society itself.”16

Eliasson situates his work as a foil to conventional practices of visual art

reception, and he identifies the pre-mediated quality of most museum-going

experiences as a crucial counterpoint to the open-ended philosophy of spectatorship

he evinces with The Weather Project. He posits that “the responsibility of the

institution lies in exposing the ideology of display as an integral part of the display,

thereby making the mediation a part of the exhibition.” By way of The Weather

Project, Eliasson activates the museum as a vital site for revealing its own potential

The Weather Project illustrates this tension between a representation and that which it

mirrors by providing a false sun as representational object; it simultaneously

approximates nature and remains adamantly cultural. The work may mimic the sun,

but this sun remains framed by the space of a museum. The Weather Project

encourages viewers to approach both critically and instinctively. Spectators may

contemplate the work as an art object, perhaps marveling at its mechanical felicity or

its understated beauty. We may also respond corporeally towards the work, basking in

its rays, prostrating ourselves before its light. The Weather Project’s installation

allows for multiple responses and modes of reception, marking the role of the viewer

as both participant and spectator; she is simultaneously receptive and productive: a

fundamental posture of the televisual age.

16 In The Weather Project, 136.

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mediating effects.17 In a lengthy published conversation between Eliasson and Tate

Modern staff, the artist foregrounds his wish for transparency and describes the Tate

(and other museums) as “prefabricated experiences” wherein representation is already

marked, circumscribed, and determined by the institutional matrix.18 The curators

and museum director counter Eliasson’s veiled accusation by describing ways in

which they try to make the experience of visiting the Tate viewer-centered and by

explaining how viewers are given agency to interpret and encounter works in their

own way, space, and time. For example, the staff cites Tate-established practices

such as signing exhibit descriptions with the curator’s initials so that viewers

understand these explanations as one person’s interpretation rather than statements of

fact.19 Despite this and other examples the curators offer regarding how the Tate tries

to create an environment in which the viewer is central to the museum-going

experience and to the artwork’s placement and reception, Eliasson insists that the

museum—and he, as an artist—has a further responsibility to reveal its own methods

of mediation and display. He asserts that a viewer’s experience cannot and should

not be proscribed, suggesting that there is no “truthful experience, because I believe

people just see what they want to see; it’s their own projection.” 20

17 The Weather Project, 136.

Eliasson even

goes so far as to argue that the environment we live in and, by extension, his project,

18 “Behind the Scenes: A Round-Table Discussion,” in The Weather Project, 66. 19 In my opinion, a rather weak, if not counterproductive, defense against Eliasson’s assertions of over-mediation. 20 “Behind the Scenes,” 71.

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are constructed wholly through our experience of them: “I’m looking at how we

create our surroundings by engaging with them: we being a result of our environment,

and the environment being a result of us taking part in it.”21

Eliasson’s work explicitly enacts the spectator-object relationship I identify as

implicit to the interaction between viewers and Minimalist sculptures in the space of

the museum. In both cases, the televisual gaze functions as a circulation of desire

around both the object and the viewer and as a bridge between collective and

intimates modes of visual experience. The Weather Project’s overt mingling of the

individual and collective embodies an essential element of my construction of

ambience in the televisual age. On a very basic level, museums require from visitors a

commingling of public and private reception: we bring our individual, private

selves—our personal thoughts, emotions, and backgrounds—into the space of the

By emphasizing the

interconnectedness of situated experience, Eliasson not only describes salient aspects

of his own art practice, but also signals the broader effect of ambient art and

ambience as it relates to the televisual. Instead of creating a work which merely

presents itself to the viewer, already complete and self-contained, Eliasson aims to

construct pieces wherein outside forces, viewers, nature, the play of light and fog,

etc., constantly act on his artistic materials. Eliasson’s work is never static; it is

continually mutable—just as the televisual gaze reveals the ever-changing and

temporally-distended nature of visual experience and spectators’ collective expression

of individual modes of reception.

21 “Behind the Scenes,” 72.

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museum where we must, in turn, interact publicly with all manner of others, both

objects (the artworks) and subjects (other viewers). The ways in which we (inter)act

in the space of the museum varies depending on the work, ranging from standing still

and contemplative for long periods of time in front of one work to strolling idly

through the galleries and only looking briefly at the art as we pass by. These modes of

viewing affect and are affected by those around us, just as viewers watching the guard

strolling across Carl Andre’s 144 Lead Square at the MoMA may have been

encouraged to do the same. Eliasson takes this basic aspect of museum-going and

transforms it from underlying convention to a central, palpable element of his work.

When he offers up a space ripe for engagement, as he does with The Weather Project,

Eliasson presents a stage for both the singular viewer and the collective public of

viewers to act and interact.

We can see one aspect of Eliasson’s subversion of what he considers

conventional museum-going reflected in his allegation that most museums situate

themselves speciously as un-mediating grounds upon which artworks figure,

supposedly allowing viewers an intimate, direct connection to works of art: “the

museum presents itself as non-representational, and yet is almost hyper-representation

in its commodification of sensuality. So what I’m asking you to address is that whilst

there is this tactile quality in the details, the institutional mainframe is so strong, so

representational, that everything else loses its ability to engage with the person inside

the space.”22

22 Olafur Eliasson, “Survey,” The Weather Project [catalog], 66.

Accordingly, Eliasson hopes to open up a discursive space for viewing

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in which spectators may move in ways beyond the back-and-forth flow dictated by an

arrangement of paintings along a wall. The Weather Project encourages spectators to

watch as well as look, noting and interpolating the movement and behavior of other

viewers; private experience is publically enacted in and by a collective body of

museum-goers.

This environment of public viewing mirrors everyday realities of the

televisual age. Television saturates our visual understanding; it is all but impossible

to participate in (Western) culture without being influenced by the medium and its

effects, whether one actively seeks out television as a regular viewer or not.

Moreover, The Weather Project situates individual visual experience literally as a

public act; a viewer may choose how she responds to the work, physically or

otherwise, but her private response immediately becomes a public or, at least,

collectively-realized, act amidst a community of other viewers. The work addresses

the viewer simultaneously as both an individual and as part of a collective/communal

body. In this way, The Weather Project bears comparison not only with television,

but, more specifically, with advertising, an association made all the more compelling

if we consider Michel Warner’s assertion about the effect of public-ness on the

consumption of commercial objects in his book Publics and Counterpublics: “[O]ur

desires have become recognizable through their display in the media, and in the

moment of wanting them, we imagine a collective consumer witnessing our wants

and choices.”23

23 Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 169-70.

In this analysis, Warner draws a parallel between the individual

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consumer’s desires and how she envisions a collective body of other consumers will

witness that desire. I find this juxtaposition instructive both in regard to the

spectatorial experience of an ambient community of (televisual) viewers and in

relation to Eliasson’s intervention on the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. For me,

ambience and the televisual gaze respectively describe a mediumistic model and a

mode of spectatorship informed by a collective body of other viewer-subjects, actual

or imagined. Not only does The Weather Project create and sustain an environment

in which viewers can respond to the visual choices made by others—i.e. basking on

the floor of the Hall in the glow of Eliasson’s sun or locating themselves and their

companions in the mirrors hundreds of feet above—Eliasson also deliberately

incorporates the spectacle of public opinion into publicity for the installation,

consequently inculcating viewers in a public dialogue even before they set foot in the

museum.

While still in the conceptual phase of creating The Weather Project, Eliasson

conducted a survey of Tate staff to gauge how they felt about certain aspects of the

weather and climate. The survey included questions such as “To what extent do you

find the weather affects your mood?”, “Do you think tolerance to other individuals is

proportional to the weather?” and “Do you think there is a hierarchy of daylight in

society?”24

24 The Weather Project, 63-64.

Whether or not Eliasson’s research pool was skewed unfairly because it

consisted entirely of museum workers might be an interesting question if it had not

been rendered moot by Eliasson’s use of the responses. Contrary to his stated

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intentions, Eliasson did not use the survey results to create his work; the piece

actually had little tangible connection to any of the questions. Instead, Eliasson’s

questionnaire and the staff’s answers became a part of the work, serving as

propaganda for the installation and holding a prominent place in the published

catalog.

The publicity for the exhibition further reveals Eliasson’s interest in the

constructive powers of subjectivity. Publicity posters call to their audience in an

assertive, all-caps font, querying “Have you talked about the weather today?” or

proclaiming, “47% of people believe the idea of weather in our society is based on

culture, 53% believe it is based on nature,” with basic information about the exhibit

and the Tate Modern’s “Unilever Series” logo relegated to bottom half of the yellow

cardstock. The latter poster text, especially, calls into question standard notions of

authority and factuality, which may prompt the spectator to begin questioning modes

of mediation before she even sets foot in the museum. By transforming individual

responses to a seemingly innocuous survey into publicized (and public) statistics,

Eliasson compels viewers to think of themselves as part of a public body. The

statements and questions used on the museum posters evoke a universalized sense of

beliefs about weather, when in fact the “people” to whom the posters refer are only

museum staffers, not a statistically-relevant or unbiased sampling of the population at

large. To this extent, the claims made by the posters are specious, signifying the

unstable veracity of public opinion and the capricious sensibility of collective thought

and universalized assumptions. Moreover, by using survey questions and answers as

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advertisements for The Weather Project, Eliasson was able both to forefront his focus

on people’s subjective interpretations of supposedly natural phenomena and avoid

showing any photographic representations of the actual work. This strategic decision

to withhold images of the work was also part of Eliasson’s initiative to strip away the

layers of mediation commonly clinging to artworks, particularly those commissioned

for and installed in an institution as internationally renowned as the Tate. While the

advertising also adds a layer of mediation, insisting on the viewer’s involvement in a

public discourse about the weather, this mediation is more intellectual than visual—

even though the spectator’s cognitive assumptions about the exhibition could affect

her visual reception.

Eliasson’s choice not to include images of his work on the promotional

materials may emphasize The Weather Project’s participatory dimensions—its you-

had-to-be-there-ness—but, on a practical level, the installation is also quite difficult

to photograph since it shapes the viewer’s visual experience in multifaceted ways.

The work is literally luminous and bodily immersive; an orange glow and a light fog

surround The Weather Project’s viewers, visceral qualities that cannot be conveyed

through mere visual representation. Curator Susan May observes, “The viewer’s

response to the work […] is the work,” echoing Eliasson’s assertion that “with each

viewer the readings and the experience are nailed down to one subjective condition;

without the viewer there is, in a way, nothing.”25

25 “Meteorologica,” in The Weather Project [catalog], 23; “Daniel Birnbaum in conversation with Olafur Eliasson,” in Olafur Eliasson, eds. Madeleine Grynsztejn, Daniel Birnbaum, and Michael Speaks (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), 14.

How viewers respond to the

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installation becomes part of the installation, inscribing Eliasson’s piece with not only

a corporal dimension but also a temporal one. The Weather Project is, in the artists’

own words, a “structure with which visitors can engage.”26 Reacting to the pervasive

specter of technology and the televisual in contemporary society, Eliasson’s work

calls attention to the mediated quality of vision and spectatorial reception.27 The

Weather Project is not merely visual. It is also ambient and situational,

representational and illusory. Encouraging viewers to engage with each other and

with the work, The Weather Project asks us to contemplate the vicissitudes of

representation, how our bodies and the bodies of others are both inscribed on and

circumscribed by the piece. This mode of interactive reception leads Pamela Lee to

query, “What am I seeing here, the work seems to demand, and how am I made to see

it? How does my body’s trajectory shape the course of vision itself? In what ways

does representation become reality, and, more pointedly, in what ways is my relation

to nature predetermined by what one might call the technics of naturalization?”28

26 In a conversation with artist Robert Irwin, Eliasson articulates how he envisions temporality in his own work and the overarching significance of time in visual art: “I believe that devoting attention to time has far-reaching consequences for the idea of objecthood and the dematerialization of the object. Artworks are not closed or static, and they do not embody some kind of truth that may be revealed to the spectator. Rather, artworks have an affinity with time—they are embedded in time, they are of time. This is why I sometimes call my works experimental setups; they are structures with which visitors can engage.” Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin, “Take Your Time: A Conversation,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson [catalog], edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 51.

Lee’s questions reference the temporal and scopic claims Eliasson’s installation

27 For example, Joshua Mack writes, “Eliasson operates on the sort of grand scale dictated not only by today’s global art market, but by a shift in public expectations: Ours is becoming a culture that revels in entertainment and instant gratification.” “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” Time Out New York 657 (Apr 30-May 6, 2008), http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/art/29053/take-your-time-olafur-eliasson (accessed June 9, 2008). 28 “Your Light and Space,” in Take Your Time [catalog], 34.

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inscribes on the body of the viewer, but she also recalls the work’s representational

relationship to nature. This latter aspect of her inquiry corresponds with my interest

in Eliasson’s work as an apt case study for interrogating the analogical relationships

between fiction and desire, absence and representation, and the sublime and beautiful,

which will lead, for me, towards a more cogent definition of ambience in the

televisual age. Eliasson’s sun, more analogy than mimic, is the literal and figural

focus of The Weather Project, signaling not only the significant place of technology

in the construction of the ambient but also symbolically manifesting how ambience

alludes to the sublime and vice versa.

Nature and Fiction, Representation and Desire

In his essay “Seeing Yourself Sensing,” written a few years before The

Weather Project’s installation, Eliasson articulates his struggle with the distinction

between nature and culture in his art practice:

So what is it that I know? Is it nature? Nature as such has no ‘real’ essence—

no truthful secrets to be revealed. I have not come closer to anything essential

other than myself and, besides, isn’t nature a cultural state anyway? What I

have come to know better is my own relation to so-called nature […] my

ability to see and sense and move through the landscapes around me. Looking

at nature, I find nothing […] only my own relationship to the spaces, or

aspects of my relationship to them. We see nature with cultivated eyes.

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Again, there is no true nature, there is only your and my construct of such.

Just by looking at nature, we cultivate it into an image.29

Skillfully interweaving notions of representation and relationality with ideas about

subjectivity, mediation and culture, Eliasson envisions nature as a cultural institution.

“We see nature with cultivated eyes,” he writes, a dictum wholly appropriate for my

discussion of the televisual gaze as a structuring force which imbues visual

experience with an intimate sense of relationality: between the viewer’s own body

and the object, between the viewer and other viewers, and between the object and the

space it inhabits. We cannot accept blindly that what we see is “real” (or an objective

appraisal) when our individual experiences so readily and completely shape our

visual and other sensorial faculties. Moreover, with ambient art like The Weather

Project, a viewer’s individual circumstances are not the only things which affect her

reception; she is also situated in a field of other viewers who shape her spectatorial

experience.

In his 1997 work Your Sun Machine, an obvious and direct predecessor to The

Weather Project, Eliasson renders literal his claim that we “cultivate nature into an

image.” By cutting a circular hole in the roof of an otherwise empty Los Angeles art

gallery, he lets nature inside the space, creating a minimalist piece made up solely of

the sunlight streaming through the hole in the ceiling and its trajectory across the

walls and floor of the gallery throughout the day. With this work, Eliasson situates

himself in a lineage of other artists who use similar techniques to intervene on

29 In Olafur Eliasson, 125-27.

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architectural sites and institutional spaces. For example, in his Skyspace series, begun

in the 1970s and continued into the present, James Turrell carves openings in the

ceilings of buildings to allow the viewer direct access to an image of the sky. Artist

Gordon Matta-Clark became famous in the 1970s for a similar technique, albeit to a

different end; in guerilla-style sculptural interventions, he cut large pieces of wall or

ceiling out of buildings, leaving gaping wounds in the original architecture and

putting his displaced prize on display in the gallery. Matta-Clark’s cuttings often took

place in sites either scheduled for demolition or otherwise closed off to the public,

and his pieces consist primarily of the excised remains and photographic

documentation of the holes left behind.30 Alternatively, Turrell designs his spatial

interventions to facilitate viewers’ contemplative meditation, constructing spaces he

hopes will affect each viewer intimately and personally.31

Mirroring other simple machines wherein a small aperture and light are

crucial components—the camera obscura, the telescope, the photographic camera—

Your Sun Machine, on the

other hand, does not open up a space for the viewer to look out into nature or present

her with a mere architectural intervention. It offers light to the viewer; it offers her the

sun.

30 In a compelling, albeit brief, comparison of Matta-Clark and Eliasson, Laura Richard Janku contrasts the former's piece Day's End (Pier 52), from 1975—in which Matta-Clark cut a whole in back of a pier where the sun could shine in at sunset—with Eliasson's The Weather Project. She writes, “Decades apart, both projects transform enormous industrial spaces into heliotropic naves, each achieved in the artist's own signature style: in the case of Matta-Clark, all alone, the result observed by very few; for Eliasson, surrounded by dozens of assistants, fabricators, curators, and PR agents—and an audience of thousands.” See “The Anarchitectures of Matta-Clark and Eliasson,” ArtUS, 21 (New Year 2008): 21. 31 For example, Turrell asserts about one such skyspace, “If you really enter it, the distance between work and viewer breaks down. I want to individualize the viewer. It's a one-on-one thing.” Richard Cork, “Look up to the sky and see,” Art Review (May 2006 supplement): 6-7.

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the possessive pronoun of Your Sun Machine distinguishes this installation as an

offering from the artist to the viewer.32 It is not the artist’s sun machine, but your sun

machine (or mine). Eliasson leaves the mode of reception, how the work is received,

in his spectators’ hands. He offers nature to the viewer in the guise of a work of art.33

Eliasson provides a frame for nature, taking a natural phenomenon, bringing it into

the gallery, and turning it into an art object, or, more accurately, an art experience.

The work’s title reminds the viewer that her experience of the work in that precise

moment in time and space, when and where she is bodily situated in the gallery, is

hers, her work of art, which the artist has generously proffered. By designating his

piece a “machine,” constructed to offer sunlight to the viewer, Eliasson invokes the

specter of technology even in this relatively low-tech presentation. Your Sun

Machine is both immersive, the viewer is part of the work because the work is for

her, and technological; it is ambient. Along these lines, Lee affirms that “the effects

of an immersive sensibility are not solely the terrain of computer technology: the

notion of a viewer seduced by media while wholly cognizant of its illusionist

mechanisms is at the root of popular narratives of the nineteenth century.” 34

32 “Daniel Birnbaum in conversation with Olafur Eliasson,” 14.

Employing Tom Gunning’s theory of the “cinema of attractions” in early film, Lee

aligns Eliasson’s sensibilities with cinema as well as with his artistic forbearers, such

33 Nancy also addresses this intersection between art and nature and, in particular, the way nature can be perceived as art: “The thing offered can be a thing of nature, and this is ordinarily, according to Kant, the occasion of the feeling of the sublime. But since this thing, as a thing of liberty, is not merely offered but also offers itself, offers liberty—in the striving of the imagination and in the feeling of this striving—then this thing will be instead a thing of art (moreover, nature itself is always grasped here as a work of art, a work of supreme liberty).” “The Sublime Offering,” 49. 34 In Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time, 35.

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as Turrell and Matta-Clark. What Lee mentions but fails to address fully are the

ambient aspects of Eliasson’s work—not just its literal ambient qualities, which we

can infer through her use of the term “immersion,” but the ways in which his projects

circumscribe both the viewer and a community of viewers, both the nature of the

piece itself and the culture of the (museum) space that surrounds it.

The contemporary sublime as evinced by The Weather Project depends upon

the juxtaposition of a pointedly technological object with a series of affective

qualities—an iridescent glow inspiring both basking and awe, for example—that are,

in fact, reminiscent of the “real” sun as an unrepresentable object Eliasson can only

imitate. The Weather Project embodies the boundary between nature and culture so

well precisely because Eliasson refuses to make any claims of veracity while

simultaneously mimicking nature just enough for a suitable representation of what

viewers might want from the sun: a comforting glow, but no blinding light or UV

rays, and a calming, temperate atmosphere (provided not by the work itself but by the

Tate’s own climate control) without the oppressive blaze of summer heat. Or, as

reviewer Dorothy Spears puts it, “on a dark winter day in London, who wouldn’t long

to see a sun glowing in atmospheric fog while lying on a concrete floor, watching

one’s own reflection make the indoor equivalent of snow angels?”35

35 Dorothy Spears, “Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully,” New York Times (September 2, 2007),

While with Your

Sun Machine, Eliasson creates an opening to bring the sun’s effects directly to the

gallery visitor, with The Weather Project, he represents the sun inside the museum on

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/arts/design/02spea.html?ex=1347508800&en=3ea25878f71e6f27&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink (accessed June 9, 2008).

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a grand scale, again bringing it to the viewer, if only by proxy. Alternatively,

Eliasson’s gentle, alluring sun is very unlike potentially-harsher solar references, such

as artist Terence Koh’s 2007 winter installation in the lobby of New York City’s

Whitney Museum of American Art. This untitled project consists of a single 4,000-

watt bulb projecting a blinding white light into a walled-over corner of the museum

lobby. At the time of my visit, both a large sign and a guard stationed next to the

piece cautioned viewers not to look directly into the light, much like teachers instruct

children on the playground not to stare too long at the sun. The Weather Project

serves as a more appropriate example of the sublime for my purposes than a work

such as Koh’s light art, not only because it is majestic, but because Eliasson

approximates the natural vastness and the all-encompassing glow of the sun without

sliding over into the unbearable.

Edmond Burke’s 1759 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the

Beautiful associates the sublime with a kind of delighted terror, but this does not

mean that an occasion of sublimity need cause actual discomfort or approach

intolerability. He makes an important distinction, however, between the delight

experienced because of the idea of terror, such as the distant threat of a horrible, yet

magnificent, thunder storm, and terror or pain as such, which do not generate any

sublime feelings because the body is too overwhelmed by the instinct for self-

preservation.36

36 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 97.

Burke links both beauty and the sublime to the experience of

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pleasure, but in different ways.37 He identifies beauty as a simpler pleasure based in

matters of taste—the pleasure expressed when applauding an imitation’s

verisimilitude to the original, for example—whereas, confronted with the sublime,

“the mind is […] entirely filled with its object.”38 For this reason, the sun, for Burke,

is a prime example of a sublime object: “Mere light is too common a thing to make a

strong impression on the mind, and without a strong impression nothing can be

sublime. But such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it

overpowers the sense, is a very great idea.”39

37 While Burke identifies the importance of distinguishing the difference between beauty and the sublime—no matter their possible similarities or their potential convergences—he also insists that these terms remain related, stating that he aims to “consider beauty as distinguished from the sublime; and in the course of the enquiry, to examine how far it is consistent with it.” He elucidates this divergence with a painterly comparison: “If the qualities of the sublime and beautiful are sometimes found united, does this prove, that they are the same, does it prove, that they are any way allied, does it prove even that they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and white may soften, may blend, but they are therefore not the same.” Philosophical Inquiry, 128, 158.

Much like the difference between Koh’s

high-powered light and Eliasson’s false sun, we cannot necessarily extrapolate that

just because Burke classifies the sun as a sublime object that The Weather Project

evinces sublimity by association—because it mimics the sun or because it is vast. My

reclamation of the sublime in Eliasson’s work confronts the tensions he evokes

between representation and nature and the relationship of fiction to pleasure and

desire. Rather than merely associating theories of the sublime with inherent qualities

of Eliasson’s installations, I approach The Weather Project as a decisive example of

the intersection of ambience, the technological sublime, and desire in the televisual

age.

38 Philosophical Inquiry, 69, 101. 39 Philosophical Inquiry, 120.

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Throughout his oeuvre, both pre- and post-The Weather Project, Eliasson

strives to create spaces of interactivity and perceptual awakening, questioning the

relationship between representation and truth and nature and culture. His quest to

engage his audience and challenge their imaginative faculties sometimes results in

works, such as Your Sun Machine and The Weather Project, which lay the onus of

visual experience at the viewer’s proverbial feet; the viewer is largely in control of

her perception and reception of the work. In other instances, in order to surprise or

unsettle spectatorial reception, Eliasson wrests perceptual control away from the

viewer. For example, in yet another sun-based work—Double Sunset (1998), an

outdoor installation in Utrecht, Holland—Eliasson offers not a viewer-owned

experience but an artistic deception, an incandescent trompe l'oeil. Using materials

and methods he later adapted for the Tate Modern’s false sun, Eliasson placed an

enormous yellow disc of metal on scaffolding high above the cityscape so that it

would appear from afar as if balanced on the city’s horizon. At sunset, residents were

startled briefly by the specter of an impossible double sunset over Utrecht—the “true”

sunlight reflecting off the metal to give it an ethereal glow—before recognizing the

false sun as an artificial construction. While Eliasson did not try to make his sun

appear real, his installation’s impersonation, bound to its reliance on the real sun for

reflective light, was still meant to jolt the viewer momentarily out of her safe, easy

assumptions about nature, the weather and her perception of the world. Double Sunset

is the beautiful (after all, what could be romantic than a sunset?) made uncanny, even

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more so because, unlike his gallery pieces, Eliasson’s environmental works are often

installed without announcement to the general public.

Eliasson reveals his interest in uncanny beauty and finding ways to render

nature curiously unnatural in another related 1998 project, which he restaged several

times in different cities. With Green River, he intervenes directly on the environment

instead of imitating natural effects, producing a startling disconnect between what we

expect from nature and what we see. In each of the locations chosen for the piece,

from Stockholm to Los Angeles and beyond, Eliasson executed his work without any

warning or public announcement. By pouring a small amount of a non-toxic, readily-

available powder called uranin (conventionally used for tracing leaks in plumbing

systems) into city rivers, Eliasson turned the water a startlingly bright, sickly green.

Though he now acknowledges that this sort of intervention is no longer possible post-

9/11 because of the panic it might induce, Eliasson’s aim at the time was to shock

each city’s inhabitants, unseating for just a moment their commonly-held views about

how the river operates in their lives and as a part of their city’s infrastructure.40

40 Eliasson “fiercely” asserted that the Green River project is no longer viable today during a lecture at the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut. See a review of the lecture by Michiel van Raaij, “’It Makes a Difference to Make Art’ Or, Olafur Eliasson calls for critical architecture,” Eikongraphia [blog] (March 12, 2007),

Expressing a concern that explaining the work beforehand would pre-mediate the

experience of the unnaturally green river for his viewers, Eliasson acknowledges that

part of his interest in the project was the brief moment of fear the color change might

evoke in the viewer as she contemplates whether or not the water might have been

http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=1311 (accessed June 15, 2008).

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poisoned.41

In his 1790 treatise Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant identifies the

sublime as a kind of “negative pleasure.” As with Burke’s earlier theorization of the

sublime as delighted terror, Kant’s negative pleasure does not translate to displeasure.

Rather, the awe or astonishment elicited by an experience of the sublime is “negative”

because of its intractability, manifested in the impossibility of the subject’s desire for

a harmonious resolution of the tension between the Imagination’s aesthetic judgment

of the sublime object’s vastness and Reason’s attempt to circumscribe that same

magnitude.

He hoped that this momentary fear, eventually allayed by post-event

press coverage and by the relatively quick dissipation of uranin from the water, would

startle the viewer out of her preconceived notions about nature and its ostensibly

dependable immutability in order to remind her that even nature is mediated and

affected by society. Just as the successful mimicry of nature often heralds beauty, this

negotiation between uncertainty, fear, and pleasure earmarks one aspect of the

contradictions inherent in the experience of the sublime. My parsing of this

experience will subsequently lead toward an elaboration of the relationship between

desire and the televisual gaze and, later in this chapter and in Chapter 3, a more

coherent construction of the televisual gaze.

42

41 “Daniel Birnbaum in conversation with Olafur Eliasson,” 18.

Likewise, we cannot ascribe the contemporary sublime to

representation or its failure, but rather to what occurs in the moment of

representation, a moment both deeply individual and made manifestly public in the

42 The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 119.

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space of the museum. The dichotomy between pleasure and pain evinced by the

sublime—wherein pain and pleasure either occur simultaneously or emerge from each

other—stems, in turn, from the paradox of trying to represent an inapprehensible

object or event.43 Or, as Jean François Lyotard explicates, the sublime “occurs when

the imagination in fact fails to present any object that could accord with a concept,

even if only in principle. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but

not the capacity to show an example of it.”44

Kant articulates the difference between the sublime and the beautiful around

an associated tension. Beauty is straightforward, it is either inherent to the object or

not, whereas the sublime only emerges when nature and culture intersect. The

sublime is not inherent to the object but instead stems from the (cultivated) viewer:

“We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the Beautiful of nature; but seek it

for the Sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought which introduces

sublimity into the representation of nature.”

Hence, a rift develops between vision

and one’s ability to interpret.

45

43 Jean François Lyotard writes, “The sublime feeling, which is also the feeling of the sublime, is, according to Kant, a powerful and equivocal emotion: it brings both pleasure and pain. Or rather, in it pleasure proceeds from pain. […] this contradiction (which others might call neurosis or masochism) develops as a conflict between all the faculties of the subject, between the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to ‘present’ something.” “An Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 10.

Therefore, the sublime exists almost

completely in the eyes of the beholder. The object only excites the possibility of

sublimity, and each individual subject must approach and experience the object in her

44 “What is the Postmodern?” 10. 45 The Critique of Judgment, 104.

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own fashion. Unlike other aesthetic experiences—the experience of beauty, for

example—the sublime overwhelms the normal ways in which the viewer responds to

a visual object (e.g. through language), rendering the viewer “dumb with amazement”

or otherwise overcome.46

This powerful effect of the object over the viewer may recall critiques of

television I discuss earlier, particularly the common assertion that television leaves its

viewers too “dumb” to do anything but passively consume. Certainly the use of the

word “dumb” in association with the sublime, i.e. “dumb with amazement,” registers

as rhetorically dissimilar to how we might describe someone taken in by the

television set—perhaps as passive, mute, or stupid. The connotation of the word

ranges from transcendent to practically lobotomizing. That said, I assert that the

significance of this congruence should not be about how we inflect the word “dumb,”

but in the action (or inaction) it supposes. Even if we believe, which I do not, that

television turns its viewers into passive, hypnotized, stupid consumers and that

experiences of the sublime enact a more revelatory, perhaps even intellectual,

speechless awe, we must recognize at least two points of commonality. First, in both

instances the viewer is theoretically overtaken by a pleasure, desire, or affect so great

that she cannot articulate it. Second, the viewer enacts this affective response

simultaneously in relation to the object and its situated presence and as a response

which emerges from her own body. In this interaction, the viewer becomes the

46 David E. Nye writes, “The test for determining what is sublime is to observe whether or not an object strikes people dumb with amazement. The few experiences that meet this test have transcendent importance both in the lives of individuals and in the construction of culture.” American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 16.

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vanishing point, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, of the object’s effects, signaling

my continuing exposition of the televisual gaze and televisual pleasure in this

project.47

In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s neo-

Kantian perspective similarly stresses the importance of reciprocity between viewer

and object: “Both [beauty and the sublime] seek to exceed meaning, to overload it

with some sort of presentation of meaning as more than itself, but where the beautiful

is intransitive, and is indifferent to negativity as an active force—indifferent, actually,

to either activity or force […]—the sublime must be transitive in some sense and is

characteristically made out of reactivity of some kind.”

48

Olafur Eliasson’s art is not complete without you; in fact, you are part of it.

His works are not self-sufficient objects in the usual sense; rather, they are

environments—productive arrangements, heterogeneous apparatuses—

awaiting your arrival. Indeed, they need you. To a certain extent that is, of

course, true of every work of art, since all aesthetic experience requires an

experiencing subject. But in Eliasson’s case the contribution of the active

This reactivity feeds Daniel

Birnbaum’s explication of the mutual need and desire between object and viewer

evinced by Eliasson’s work:

47 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 125. I use their phrase, “You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point” throughout Chapter 1 to discuss the reciprocal effects of the televisual gaze. 48 (New York: Allworth Press, 1999), 13.

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viewer is so central to the works that one might wager the claim that this very

activity is what they are about. You belong to them, and they belong to you.49

Birnbaum’s assertion that Eliasson’s works are nothing without the viewer resonates

with defining characteristics of Minimalist sculpture, the televisual gaze, and

televisual pleasure as I have and will continue to discuss them. The viewer may desire

completion in the object, but the object cannot be complete without her presence. In

this case, the tenets of unrepresentability and the reception of an unrepresentable

visual object, also revealed in the notion of the contemporary sublime, dictate that the

object achieve its sublimity in the mind of the viewer.

50

By using a mirrored ceiling, Eliasson not only suspends the potential that

someone could mistake the installation’s environment for a natural one, he also

The Weather Project’s

approach to nature, its technological assumption of nature’s characteristics without

any of the actual effects of a natural environment, builds a tension in the collective

bodies of its viewers between lived deceit and constructed truth. Much like the

tension of Lacan’s split subject—forever torn between her projected image and her

embodied self—The Weather Project demonstrates the friction between nature and its

representation. The work’s mirrored ceiling literally displays this friction, obliging

viewers to recognize and reflect on the constructed-ness of the project’s

impersonation of natural phenomena.

49 “Heliotrope,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson [catalog], 131. 50 Nancy argues that art which embodies its own contradictions, art which approaches not being merely art, is that which we might call sublime: “On the other hand, it is art that suspends itself and shudders, as Adorno says, art that trembles on the border of art, giving itself as its task something other than art, something other than the world of the fine arts or than beautiful works of art: something ‘sublime.’” “The Sublime Offering,” 27.

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encourages audience participation through a highly visible reflection of the viewer’s

body back into the work. The mirror functions on a number of levels. On the one

hand, because of its distance from the ground, the viewer appears very small, and

while she may just barely be able to recognize herself in the reflection, she can

nevertheless use the mirror as a sort of map to locate herself within the greater

topography of the Hall. Similarly, the viewer is both isolated from her own body in

the mirror—since she appears distorted and nearly unrecognizable—and intimately

associated with the installation as a whole because the mirror’s reflection captures the

position of her body. At a specific moment in time and space, she is connected to a

community of viewers by her triangulated understanding of the location of their

bodies in relation to her own and to the project at large. The Weather Project’s

mirrored ceiling both isolates and locates the viewer in the “bigger picture,” thus

situating her in a field of collective vision and, significantly, a collective experience

of the sublime, in which individual responses provoke public reception.

Eliasson’s deployment of mirrors to create a fully-round, luminous sun from a

semicircle of commonplace bulbs signifies his quite literal use of smoke and mirrors

to create a naturally-appearing, yet wholly unnatural environment. To this end,

Eliasson revels in the impossibility of truth in representation. Critic Anne Colin notes

that “by exposing its origins and mechanisms, [Eliasson] refuses to let the artwork be

fetishized. By showing us how it is made, he shows us that it is only nature installed.

An orange sun in Tate Modern is not an orange sun in the sky. The aesthetic event

resides in the tension between the reality of the image and the model to which it

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refers.”51 What The Weather Project illustrates, at both the most basic and most

complex levels, is the friction inherent to Nancy’s analogies: between fiction and

desire and between representation and its absence. Part and parcel of the affective

experience of Eliasson’s work is the juxtaposition of a deliberate exposure of process

(how the artwork is made) and the visceral experience of an artificial, yet radiant,

“natural” projection. This tension manifests itself in the body of the viewer

prostrating herself in front of the work. The Weather Project flirts with our visual

expectations and revels in the contradictions between reality and illusion which it

brings about. As May writes in the installation catalog, “Experience is rendered both

physiological and psychological in [Eliasson’s] works through an accentuation of the

gap between the rational expectation of an occurrence and its correlation with the

visceral experience of it.”52

51 When Colin states that Eliasson reveals “how it is made,” she is referring to the fact that, upon close inspection, the individual bulbs of the lamps which make up The Weather Project’s sun are visible. There is no illusion about where the light is coming from or how it is being reflected off the ceiling mirrors to create a full, round sun-like object out of a semi-circle of commonly-found light bulbs. “Olafur Eliasson: vers une nouvelle realite / Olafur Eliasson: the Nature of Nature as Artifice,” Art Press 304 (September 2004): 37.

In a culture in which technology has become a normative

part of everyday life—from the rushing whir of oncoming traffic and the hum of

electronics in every room to television’s ambient glow and the neon aura of the post-

industrial city—The Weather Project’s recreation of a natural body through entirely

mechanized means may read as ironic. Or, we may interpret Eliasson’s feint as

indicative of a larger question concerning spectatorship in the televisual age: if we are

constantly bombarded with images and images are always mediated, what parts of our

52 “Meteorologica,” 18.

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visual lives are representations and what parts are real? Moreover, how does this

notion of visual truth affect our individual and collective desires toward televisual

objects? How do we derive pleasure from what can only ever be a fiction?

Visible Cause, Invisible Affect: Beauty, Pleasure, Desire

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

~ John Keats53

In the opening anecdote of his seminal text Vision and Painting, Norman

Bryson retells a paradigmatic story in the history of Western art. First recorded in

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the tale recounts a competition between two Greek

painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, and acts as a parable of art’s continued development

towards greater and greater veracity in the imitation of nature through representation.

As Pliny describes it, Zeuxis challenged his rival Parrhasius to a competition: which

man could paint the more realistic representation? Zeuxis’s entry, painted grapes, was

so lifelike that birds flew down from the trees to peck at the false fruit. Emboldened

by what he felt was his sure victory, Zeuxis asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain

over his frame and reveal his painting, only to find that Parrhasius’s curtain was, in

fact, his painting—a masterful trompe l’oeil—and that there was nothing beneath the

53 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1820. Available online at http://www.john-keats.com/ (accessed May 5, 2008).

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represented cloth. Graciously, Zeuxis conceded to Parrhasius’s superiority; while he

may have deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived a fellow artist.54

In Bryson’s analysis, this tale serves as an example of the specious fallacy of

representational accuracy or veracity, a lens through which he examines E.H.

Gombrich’s book Art and Illusion. Gombrich disclaims an evolutionary model for

artistic styles: generation after generation of artists moving closer and closer to true

representation, illusion so great as to fool us all, not just the birds.

55 The implied but

never fully addressed remainder of this discussion is that beauty, and the act of

striving towards conveying the beautiful in all its glory, is one of the many reasons an

artist might seek verisimilitude. For instance, in The Critique of Judgment, Kant

addresses how quickly the subject becomes disinterested in an object when she

discovers its deceit—art attempting to imitate nature—and asserts that, “In a product

of beautiful art we must become conscious that it is Art and not Nature; but yet the

purposesiveness in its form must seem to be as free from all constraint of arbitrary

rules as if it were a product of mere nature […] Nature is beautiful because it looks

like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet

it looks like Nature.”56

54 Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 1.

It is worth noting here that a so-called realist representation

may not actually be one that is true-to-life; how often do we deem a film, a television

show, or a painting “realistic” when it is in fact completely fictional? Truth is not the

55 See Norman Bryson, “Chapter 2: The Essential Copy,” in Vision and Piainting, 13-35 and E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [1960] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 56 The Critique of Judgment, 176-178, 187.

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same as realism. And whereas realism often inspires a certain pleasure (due to the

implication of great artistic skill, if nothing else), truth and pleasure are not

necessarily allied terms. To re-appropriate Pliny and Bryson for my argument: while

Zeuxis’s grapes may be beautiful, rendering nature as art, Parrhasius’ trompe l’oeil

curtain approaches the sublime because it simultaneously feeds and disrupts his

rival’s desire, unsettles his perceptions, and makes representation uncanny. In the

following pages, I employ several of Eliasson’s earlier pieces that revel in these

perceptual tensions in order to parse out the relationship between truth, beauty, and

the sublime in The Weather Project and, by extension, explore the intersection of

pleasure, desire, and ambience in the televisual age. The works I discuss below

epitomize specific aspects of Eliasson’s art practice which he subsequently

recuperates and integrates for use in The Weather Project. Eliasson’s use of fog,

mirrors, and light to imitate nature and effect feelings of the beautiful and the sublime

illustrates the influence of technology on contemporary modes of reception and

signals how the delicate balance of truth and fiction comes to figure in my analysis of

the televisual gaze and televisual pleasure.

Eliasson’s aptly named Beauty, first installed in 1993 but most recently

featured in his 2008-2009 traveling retrospective “Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time,”

exemplifies Eliasson’s fascination with the intersections of technology and nature

while underscoring the persistence with which his work plays with the spectator’s

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expectation about how she is supposed to interact with the object of art.57 I

encountered Beauty in the basement of P.S. 1 in June 2008 as part of the

aforementioned retrospective. An installation of a perforated hose attached visibly to

the ceiling of a large, darkened black box room, Beauty consists of a mist of water

shimmering down from the hose in a slow, flickering frieze lit only by a spotlight,

which casts a rainbow across the surface of the water, the streams of mist evoking, as

reviewer Tessa DeCarlo describes, “Aurora Borealis, like strands of hair, like ghostly

fire.”58

57 This exhibition toured touring the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 8, 2007 - February 24, 2008), New York’s Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (April 20 - June 30, 2008), and the Dallas Museum of Modern Art (November 9, 2008 - March 15, 2009).

Walk around the curtain of mist, or through it, and the rainbow disappears—

all you see is light and mist and the darkness that surrounds them. The beauty of the

work alongside its completely transparent construction calls to mind the difference

between the amazement of seeing a rainbow on the horizon on a wet summer day as a

child and learning how to make rainbows with crystals in school. The manufactured

rainbows may be just as pretty but not as astonishing as the natural ones. In the

gallery, viewers of Beauty, myself included, watched the colors play over the face of

the water for a few minutes, some even walked up to the mist and stepped through, or

held their hands out to be sprayed, but, in the end, Beauty remains just a very pretty

science project. However, this is not a criticism. Just like a child making rainbows

with crystals, I find Beauty fascinating because Eliasson shows his work. He

constructs a rainbow and makes no attempt to hide its origins. Unlike Double Sunset,

58 “Olafur Eliasson Take Your Time,” The Brooklyn Rail (Oct 2007), http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/10/artseen/olafur (accessed June 9, 2008).

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which revels in visual trickery, Beauty’s process is completely exposed and yet the

work is no less lovely for it, demonstrating, as Michael Joseph Gross writes,

Eliasson’s “visceral embrace of beauty and wonder, prompting the kinds of basic

questions that most of us stopped asking when we were 7 years old.”59 While he sets

the stage for Beauty, it is the viewer who makes or breaks the rainbow by standing

still or walking through the mist. In the words of Klaus Biesenbach, co-curator of the

MoMA installation of “Take Your Time,” “the artist’s work delivers a one-two

punch: First, there is a ‘wow’ in reaction to the visual gymnastics; then an ‘aha!’ as

the mechanisms and concepts behind them become clear.”60 The installation is not

intrinsically impressive or skillful; it is both frivolous and, like much Minimalist art,

something that anyone with the proper equipment could construct themselves.61

59 “The Falls Guy,” New York Magazine (June 8, 2008),

Also

like Minimalism, which inspires an interaction between viewer and object that

ultimately becomes the subject of the work, Beauty courts interactivity, although it is

more explicit than most Minimalist sculpture in its outward attractiveness.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47554/ (accessed June 12, 2008). 60 Quoted in Joshua Mack, “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson.” 61 In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, Gilbert-Rolfe sets up a dichotomy similar to one described by Burke—between beauty, as frivolous, attractive, and feminine, and the sublime, as androgynous and uncontrollable—yet his nuanced understanding of beauty and the sublime is quite removed from 18th-century constructions. (For his part, Burke’s distinctions between beauty and the sublime are fairly schematic—beauty is small, smooth, polished, delicate and light and the sublime is rugged, vast, infinite, dark and gloomy. Philosophical Inquiry, 157.) Gilbert-Rolfe claims the contemporary sublime cannot be found “where it was to be found two hundred years ago,” and the beautiful in his account is void of responsibility and is closely aligned with frivolity—capable of becoming dangerous because it inspires inattention to logic. Beauty’s “relevance lies in its capacity to be irrelevant and yet remain indispensable.” Contemporary Sublime, 1; 14.

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In Beauty, a simple mechanical setup approximates nature without attempting

to be natural, and the work revels in its technical genesis, simulating natural beauty

while calling attention to its mechanical origins. The experience of Beauty’s viewers

in conjunction with the work’s mechanics open up a space where technology

approximates nature, possibly even inspiring a certain emotional resonance in its

spectators.62 And yet I would argue Eliasson’s work is compelling beyond its

evocation of “pleasurable sensations and [its] clever metaphysical gags” precisely

because of the tension he inspires between the desire for the pleasure of pure

spectacle (a desire to believe the representation) and the transparency of the work’s

mechanics.63 While critic Holland Cotter states that Eliasson engages in a “politics of

enchantment,” we nevertheless cannot experience his art in blissful ignorance of its

mechanics, of the technology and labor behind its manufacturing.64

62 Joshua Morgenthau writes, “Wonder does not always equate to mystery. By revealing his equipment, the artist compulsively demystifies his illusions. This creates an interesting tension between the feeling that we have seen something deep, or glimpsed some inner nature, and our knowledge that the whole enterprise is highly orchestrated. But the tendency leaves a lingering doubt: Does Eliasson, in his habitual frankness, only narrowly escape aesthetic over-indulgence?” “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” The Brooklyn Rail (June 2008),

This tension

between identification and enjoyment, on the one hand, and the specter of technology

and the dissatisfaction of the medium’s disjointed presentation, on the other,

illustrates both a central tenet of what I term ambient art and what I will later expand

on in my discussion of televisual pleasure: the interplay of pleasure and disrupted

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/06/artseen/take-your-time-olafur-eliasson (accessed June 13, 2008). 63 Morgenthau, “Take Your Time.” 64 “Stand Still; A Spectacle Will Happen,” New York Times (April 18, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/arts/design/18elia.html?ex=1366257600&en=079a1a680a92ead3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink (accessed April 20, 2008).

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pleasure. Directly translating this tension to television is relatively easy. Television

inspires viewers to believe the illusions it provides, wrapping us in its narrative

cocoons while concurrently exposing its viewers to the cycle of desire and loss

intrinsic to an episodic system broken up even further by commercials. That said, I

prefer to execute this translation between Eliasson and television more subtly.

Eliasson’s work and the mode(s) of reception it encourages from viewers exemplify

an essential element of televisuality or, more specifically, how the ubiquity of the

televisual may influence the production of and response towards a work of

contemporary art. The liminal affectivity—born in the rift between pure

entertainment and perceptual awareness—of Beauty or, on a grander scale, The

Weather Project, recalls my parsing of ambience and its separation from and

dependence on the aura. Ambience designates the juxtaposition of visual pleasure

with the technological profligacy of the object, which is both inseparable from its

industrial, technological, or mechanical origins and able to rise above the supposed

banality of its medium. With television, this apparent contradiction is relatively

transparent: television renders naturalized fictions—visual environments made

immersive through narrative, character, setting, and cinematography—through wholly

technical means. There is nothing truthful about television, nothing natural or

tangible, and yet the effect it evokes resonates with the real-seeming, with

representative pleasure and fictionalized desire.

Eliasson, too, takes a relatively simple mechanism and reveals the beauty in

its contradictions, its representative pleasures. For example, his I only see things when

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they move (2004), also part of “Take Your Time,” is nothing more than colored glass

and light, spinning slowly on a tripod and reflecting dancing rectangles of color on

the white walls. This work is obviously more mechanical than Beauty, which at least

hints at its natural origins in waterfalls and thunderstorms, and yet it still recalls our

ability to see that which is presented to us as both real and illusion. I only see things

makes an art object out of light and mechanical equipment, asking technology to

stand in for more “painterly” modes of creative expression. For Eliasson, light,

electronic technology, and mechanical systems serve as his medium much like a

painter might choose to express her creative energy through oil paints and canvas. He

likes to play with light, which—along with a parallel but not always concurrent desire

to interrogate the boundaries between nature and culture—is a near constant in his

work. In an interview during The Weather Project’s tenure at the Tate Modern,

Eliasson identifies light as a perceptual, not physical, medium, one through which he

can most effectively compel the viewer’s participation: “The special thing about

working with light is that it is not material. It illuminates something else rather than

showing itself. So it brings you, the viewer, into the centre. You are the sculpture.”65

65 Robin Blake, “The model of a modern artist” (Interview), Financial Times, London, November 6, 2003, 13.

It is without much difficulty that Eliasson’s work both points back to topics explored

in the previous chapter and signals my forthcoming consideration of the televisual.

His installations reflect back on the viewer, making her simultaneously subject and

object: to revisit McLuhan, “images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.”

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The viewer becomes part of the work because the work requires the viewer’s

presence to function properly as a (tele)visual object.

By allowing light to speak for itself instead of using it to form an image, I

only see things presents viewers with the foundational elements—light, electricity,

machinery—of both Eliasson’s art practice and the televisual world at large. In “The

Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger’s fear that the world will increasingly be

understood as an image of itself, prompts Gilbert-Rolfe to assert that this “prognosis

that a technological image of the world would come to conceal the world from itself

seems to me to have become true. But it’s not clear to me this is a bad thing.”66

Gilbert-Rolfe’s response gestures toward, but does not condemn, contemporary

society’s increasing dependence on and dedication to technological intervention and,

indeed, the mechanical negotiation, interpretation, and representation of visual

objects. We cannot help but see the world as a representation of itself because our

vision is already mediated by language, culture, and visual technologies. As in Plato’s

allegory of the cave, we see the projected shadows of reality, but Eliasson aims to

show us both the shadows and how they are created, leading us out from behind the

partition, showing us the puppeteers, letting us glimpse the sun.67

66 Contemporary Sublime, 24. Heidegger: “Hence world picture […] does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is not taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.” Originally in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovett (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129.

67 While this line of reasoning could follow into a discussion of Lacan’s Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic, I am mainly referring to the allegory of the cave in Plato’s The Republic (trans. Paul Shorey). When the prisoner in the cave, who could heretofore only see shadows projected on a wall, is freed and forced to ascend into the light, he would first doubt that the illusions he had seen previously were not real because they were all he knew and would have to learn to slowly accept the sun and

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As Eliasson’s work indicates, and as I have and will continue to elucidate

throughout my project, mechanical or industrial techniques do not automatically

disqualify visceral, emotional, or intimate modes of visual reception. In fact, the

comparison between a piece such as 1 m3 light—first created in 1999, also part of the

“Take Your Time” retrospective, and the penultimate of Eliasson’s early works I will

use as an example—and The Weather Project serves as a perfect illustration of the

succinct Kantian pronouncement, “The sublime moves. The beautiful charms.”68

nature as true reality. After, he would never be able to go back into the cave and believe in the veracity of the shadows in the same way again. Of course, Plato imagines this primarily as a metaphor about the power of philosophy and critical reasoning. See Book 7, sections 514a-520a. Also, Plato’s use of the sun as a metaphor for visual truth and the power of reason is relevant here: “’You are aware,’ I said, ‘that when the eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colors the light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, their edge is blunted and they appear almost blind, as if pure vision did not dwell in them.[...] But when, I take it, they are directed upon objects illumined by the sun, they see clearly, and vision appears to reside in these same eyes.[...] Apply this comparison to the soul also in this way. When it is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason; but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.’” Book 7, sections 508e-509b. Available online at The Perseus Digital Library,

With 1 m3 light Eliasson maintains Beauty’s science-project sensibility while

encouraging audience participation. As its title indicates, the work is a cubic meter

demarcated by light instead of physical materials. Eliasson filled the room in which 1

m3 light was displayed with a light fog so that twenty-four small spotlights attached to

thin poles reflect the mist, rendering it a translucent white along twelve edges forming

a permeable cube. Embodying his own maxim to explore the ways in which light as a

sculptural medium illuminates things outside itself, this work highlights the centrality

of the viewer’s relationship with the object. There is no part of 1 m3 light which

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu (accessed June 13, 2008). 68 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 47.

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viewers cannot see and no part which is restricted. Viewers are welcome to stroll all

around and inside of 1 m3 light. Passing through the light-frame making up this

ephemeral light sculpture is more than just an unusual or seemingly transgressive way

of experiencing art. The interactivity allowed by 1 m3 light is, as with Beauty’s wet

mist, not just a visual experience despite light’s conventional classification as a visual

tool. Not only could I see the fog-enhanced light forming the cube bend towards me

and break as I passed through its edges, but I could also feel the warmth of the light

and the slight dampness of the mist.

A certain nostalgia lingers at the edges of 1 m3 light’s conception and

reception; walking through the cube is a compelling, yet completely transient

experience, one which I wanted to repeat again and again. The fleeting pleasure of

crossing the barely tangible frame of the cube’s edges is so ineffable, untouchable yet

present, that it begs contemplative study and continual repetition. Andy Warhol once

wrote that “Sex is nostalgia for sex,” suggesting that in the midst of an intimate

encounter we are always already mourning its loss, the indescribable moment we

cannot grasp because it is already past us by the time we apprehend it.69

69 The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1975), 53. Furthermore, Jean François Lyotard contrasts the modern sublime to the postmodern sublime through the notion of nostalgia, among other things: “the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator material for consolation or pleasure. But such feelings do not amount to the true sublime feeling, which is intrinsically a combination of pleasure and pain: pleasure in reason exceeding all presentation, pain in the imagination or sensibility proving inadequate to the concept.” “What is the Postmodern?” 14-15.

Similarly, the

pleasure of a work like 1 m3 light is different from Beauty or I only see things when

they move because the viewer can become an active part of the work, not only by

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changing her viewing position but by literally walking through its frame and into the

piece. This is an ephemeral moment of pleasure that cannot be sustained, but which

can be repeated.

In my experience of 1 m3 light, the moment of pleasure is brief because the

object is small (both in terms of scale and duration), and it is not an entirely fulfilling

pleasure because it is inscribed by desire for more and the impossibility of

satisfaction. This constant deferral of pleasure frames the idea of the televisual—

television is continually promising certain pleasures and then leaving its viewers

wanting. In the case of The Weather Project, its ambient qualities expand this

passing, indescribable pleasure by both duration and scale to create an experience just

as indefinable as but more stable than that inspired by 1 m3 light. The continual

sensation of wonder The Weather Project affects in many viewers remains an

undeniable part of our Weltanschauung for as long as we are in its presence because

the work takes up the entirety of our senses. Or, as scholar James Meyer writes, “We

lie down and lose ourselves, become part of, indeed become, the spectacle before us

[…] The Weather Project delivers a mass audience that cannot fail to be

overwhelmed by the magnitude of the installation itself: The museum is not so much

‘revealed’ as transformed into a destination, an event.” 70

70 “No More Scale: The Experience of Size in Contemporary Sculpture,” Artforum 42: 10)(Summer 2004): 222.

This encompassing aspect

of the installation marks The Weather Project as not just a pleasurable work but also

something unspeakable and transformative, as a piece that is not just seen but also

experienced.

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Beauty speaks to Eliasson’s interest in the intersection between mechanical

transparency and visual wonder; I only see things demonstrates the translation

between ordinary tools and extraordinary effects; and 1 m3 light renders visual

pleasure palpable and corporal. Lastly, Eliasson’s 1997 Room for one colour

explores the creation of a surreal immersive experience similar to that which

dominates The Weather Project. Overtly referencing its Minimalist antecedents,

Room for one colour features rows of mono-frequency neon tube-lights on the walls

and ceiling of the gallery, like several dozen Flavin light works strung together,

creating a space completely yellow in hue. Due to the strength of the glow, everything

appears either yellow or in shades of grey.71 Unlike Beauty, in which Eliasson allows

viewers the choice to perceive the piece as either a rainbow or just water and light,

Room for one colour forces our perception into a monochrome, making vision

uncanny, disrupting our notion of reality, and violating our seeing-is-believing faith

in sight. We can, of course, just leave the intrusive, yet strangely intriguing, domain

of pervasive yellow, but due to the layout of the exhibition at the MoMA, Room for

one colour—actually occupying two hallways between different wings of the show—

has to be traversed if we wish to see the entirety of the retrospective.72

71 As critic Heather Christensen describes, “Everything that has always been is now different. The overriding theme of the show [“Take Your Time”] is disruption and disorientation of the senses as a process to a new perception, message or thought.” “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” NYA Blog / New York Art Beat (June 6, 2008),

http://www.nyartbeat.com/nyablog/2008/06/take-your-time-olafur-eliasson/ (accessed June 9, 2008) 72 This was apparently not the case in its installation at the SF MoMA, where Room for one colour was actually housed in a room. While the MoMA set-up incorporates the piece more seamlessly into the environment of the museum itself, the contrast between normal and affected light is not as strong in the hallways at MoMA as it was at the SF MoMA where the use of a space with only one entrance/exit

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We walk into Room for one colour and suddenly find ourselves as if in a black

and white film with all the other spectators similarly cast in shades of grey and gazing

at each other and their surroundings curiously. While Heather Christensen argues

that Room for one colour, among other projects, “reveal[s] how the artist is able to

completely isolate the individual within his or her experience of observation,” I

disagree with this assessment.73 What Room for one colour does, and this is similar, if

on a smaller scale, to the effect of The Weather Project, is encourage our individual

contemplation while simultaneously demarcating our experience as one that takes

place among a multitude of other viewers.74 Eliasson himself counters the connection

of this perceptual experience with one of isolation: “For some reason, […] our history

has produced the misconception that experiencing individuality has to do with being

alone. But being together is greater than being alone, because we can do more. We

are more responsible.”75 While his idea of responsibility may not immediately be

apparent in his work, pieces such as Room for one colour and The Weather Project do

gesture towards his insistence on community, social engagement, and the

impossibility of a solely private or individual experience.76

made the change in lighting more jarring. This information was gleaned from a personal conversation with Mara Gladstone about the differences between the first two installations of Take Your Time.

73 Christensen, “Take Your Time.” 74 Christensen, “Take Your Time.” 75 “Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully.” 76 While Eliasson does not generally emphasize the socio-political aspects of his work, one could make an argument about his political engagement particularly in relation to the environment and the intersection of culture with nature. However, this is not my aim nor is it necessarily a central facet of Eliasson’s work, so I gloss over socio-political references in his oeuvre in favor of its aesthetic aspects.

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As a direct, conceptual predecessor to The Weather Project, Room for one

colour illustrates rather well the notion of ambience. It is imminently reproducible,

being only an arrangement of neon lights, and dependent almost entirely on

technological innovation, and yet the experience the work evokes is singular. This

piece is not about “isolation [as] a gift from the artist to the viewer,” as Christensen

asserts, but rather offers a space in which viewers may become aware of the joint

experience of those around her—private experience in a public and social arena.77

The immersive function of Room for one colour’s monochrome recalls how

the televisual gaze and televisual pleasure necessitate at least some acknowledgement

of technology’s seductive powers and potential for community formation—hence my

focus in this chapter on the connection between technology, ambience, and the

sublime. Similarly, in American Technological Sublime, David E. Nye explores the

In

this sense, Eliasson’s installation recalls the situational presence of the Minimalist

object in the space of the museum as I discussed it in Chapter 1. My experience of the

interaction between the MoMA guard and Andre’s 144 Lead Square might seem

particularly relevant because of the way the guard enacted his mastery over the

object, thereby potentially activating and altering viewers’ perceptions of the work.

However, The Weather Project also prefigures a less obvious performance of

collective spectatorship, one which I will expand upon in the subsequent chapter: the

construction of ambient community realized on the borders between public and

private reception.

77 Christensen, “Take Your Time.”

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distinctively technological aspects of the contemporary sublime as it was and is

realized in Western culture.78 Technology affects the sublime by rendering events

and sights that might have heretofore only been available to the few (vistas of

supreme natural beauty, for example) both collective and cultural.79 Nye’s

technological sublime also allows for the construction of sublime objects; not only

are the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls deemed sublime in our cultural imagination,

but so are man-made marvels, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of

Liberty. In addition, electricity, as one area of technological innovation, translates the

sublimity of large or otherwise impressive structures away from magnitude and

towards a “set of visual effects.”80

78 While Nye focuses exclusively on American culture, citing in particular the “big-ticket” sights of American cultural tourism (the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc.), his central ideas regarding technology and its intersection with theories of the sublime are still relevant, for my purposes, in the globalized context of Western Europe in which The Weather Project finds itself. However, it is worth noting that Nye does assert that the technological sublime is one of America’s central “ideas about itself”: “Americans have long found the sublime more necessary than Europeans, so much so that they have devised formations of the sublime appropriate to their pluralistic, technological society.” American Technological Sublime, xiv.

Here, in part, is where we might situate the

contemporary technological sublime in The Weather Project: while also great in

magnitude, its visual effects and the visual pleasure(s) it evokes demonstrate its

sublime potential. The Weather Project is not really beautiful; it is not charming or

pleasantly fascinating like earlier Eliasson works such as Beauty. It is starkly simple

and yet endlessly compelling, guilelessly technical and yet eminently evocative of the

sun’s allure.

79 Offering the caveat that Kant’s interpretation of the sublime asserts a necessity for a degree of intellectual sophistication on the part of the viewer, Nye argues that “The sublime is identifiable by the repetition and the universality of its effect. In this definition, the sublime is not an esoteric quality. Rather, it is available to everyone regardless of background.” American Technological Sublime, 4. 80 American Technological Sublime, 145.

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The Weather Project radiates light, its mirrors echoing the giant semicircular

sheet of bulbs so that the light resonates, from the viewer’s position over one hundred

feet below on the gallery floor, as a full circle of luminous, sun-like gold. The mirrors

also simultaneously reflect the light of the “sun” throughout the otherwise empty

space so that the whole Hall seems to radiate with an ambient glow. Similar to the

effect of Room for one colour, the mono-frequency lights of the “sun” render

everything in Turbine Hall either yellow-orange or in shades of black and grey, as

Abby Bussel describes: “Look up at the mirrors and you’re in a Bosch painting, an

industrialized garden where humanity idles somewhere between earth and sky. Turn

around, and everybody is yellow. It’s a monochromatic world, scary and beautiful.”81

81 “Mist and Mirrors,” Architectural Lighting 18: 7 (Nov/Dec 2003): 10.

There is no mistaking Eliasson’s sun for the outdoors, since the cold, grey concrete of

Turbine Hall easily marks it as an interior and industrial space, and yet many viewers

responded to the work through its ambient, “natural” qualities rather than its

technological display. Viewers of The Weather Project, myself included, alternately

basked on the cool floor of the Hall in the “sun’s” heatless rays, stared at their own

reflections in the mirrored ceiling, gazed into the lights in order to apprehend the

work’s technical construction, or simply leaned against the wall to relax and peruse

their museum programs with the aid of the Hall’s diffuse yellow glow. Despite these

rather quotidian responses, reviews of the project frequently use words like “awe-

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inspiring” and “unforgettable.”82

Viewers sit down on the cold floor. Others spread themselves out, gazing up

at their distant images with narcissistic regard. Groups of friends arrange their

bodies in ornamental configurations, opening and closing their limbs to

resemble snowflakes and stars. We look at ourselves, and at others looking at

themselves. The Weather Project’s perceptual qualities, as such, are ultimately

less compelling than the work’s social effects. The enormous Turbine Hall has

been transformed into a gathering place, a place to ‘people watch,’ a place to

be.

Meyer classifies The Weather Project as a sort of

event, instead of a mere artwork:

83

The situated experience of The Weather Project Meyer describes could easily serve as

a characterization not only of this particular installation, but also of ambience in the

televisual age.

With The Weather Project, Eliasson creates not just a singular point of

perspectival glow to be experienced by an individual, but an ambient sea of visual

sensation to be experienced by a community of spectators who are simultaneously

individual and collective. In other words, we may recall how Dan Flavin’s Pink out

of a Corner – To Jasper Johns (1963) signals the presence of the frame through its

dissolution; the glow of the neon light softens the distinctiveness of the corner it

inhabits while casting a luminous specter over the viewer, the space of the gallery,

82 See, for example, “The Weather Project,” Creative Review, London 23: 12 (December 2003): 81. 83 “No More Scale,” 220.

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and the other artworks within its circle. This encompassing effect literally illustrated

by the Flavin speaks more generally to theories of theatricality and the situated gaze

in Minimalist art. Likewise, Eliasson’s artistic practice serves as a compelling model

for elucidating the broader dichotomous relationship between ambience and the

sublime and for investigating the role of the viewer. I have argued that Minimalism

marked a radical re-visioning of the reciprocity between viewer and object in the

1960s; the contemporary technological sublime, as evinced by Eliasson’s The

Weather Project and its stylistic antecedents, similarly serves as a lynchpin for

understanding how ambience comes to play a significant role in the changing modes

of vision and spectatorship in the televisual age.

Notably, Eliasson asserts that “the only thing we have in common is that

we’re different,” before further elaborating on his theorization of visual collectivity,

which simultaneously speaks to community formation and accounts for a diversity of

perception:

I’d suggest that the vanishing point is turned around and is instead located

within us. Maybe we should find a different word for it, because the point is

that the perspective would emanate from within us into the world, and we’d

have to acknowledge that the system would differ from one person to the next,

because our vanishing points, or beginnings, we could say, are different. We

could call it the era of ‘double perspective’: on the one hand we’re able to

evaluate ourselves from the outside through our third-person point of view,

and understand that each individual participates in a larger system. On the

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other hand, we see the framework for perceiving the world as originating

within ourselves as unique individuals. So, consider a system of collectivity

with this idea of perspective in mind. In order to sustain it, I think we need to

focus on the notion of singularity.84

Eliasson’s conception of community and collectivity again references that grand

protagonist of perspectival representation and reception, the vanishing point, bringing

into sharp relief a recurring refrain of this project, the I see myself seeing myself of the

televisual age. Acknowledging the significance of individual perspectives within a

framework of collective reception(s), Eliasson’s remarks not only succinctly

encapsulate a central element of ambience as I have defined it but also gesture

towards the ways in which contemporary technologies influence our “double

perspective” and its effects in the televisual age. As with the contemporary sublime,

we may locate ambience within the body of the viewer and outside her body, in both

her individual perception and the collective response of others, and as simultaneously

dependent on the ubiquity of technological innovation and in spite of it.

By way of conclusion, let me return to the paired analogies introduced at the

beginning of this chapter: is beauty to the sublime what the aura is to ambience?

Again, these relationships are by no means exact, but they are revealing. If the

sublime’s profundity functions against the grain of beauty’s charm—not counter to it,

but both adjacent to and vastly different from it—then we can imagine ambience’s

collective engagement as parallel-to-yet-separate-from the aura’s situated singularity.

84 Olafur Eliasson, “A Conversation with Bart Lootsma,” in Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 1998), 52-53.

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Unlike beauty, the sublime inscribes a lasting and intense corporal effect in and for

the viewer; sublimity’s potential rests in the object, but the feeling of the sublime

stems from the viewer. Likewise, ambience incorporates both visual and bodily

modes of reception, positioning the spectator as not just an individual but also a

fellow viewer amidst a community of spectators. Temporality again comes to the

fore, as the time spent in the ambient object’s presence resonates as a singular

experience. Rather than the aura’s privileging of the object’s presence in time and

space, ambience privileges the viewer and a community of viewers, whether

implicitly or explicitly present.

The Weather Project articulates the tensions inherent between models of

visual fiction, ambient communities, and truth in representation, opening a space

through which my subsequent chapters will advance and further theorize notions of

ambience, televisual pleasure, and the televisual gaze. By incorporating aspects

ubiquitous to the televisual age—i.e. technological innovation, artificial light,

industrially-manufactured, and easily-replicated parts—into his work, Eliasson allows

his viewers to find beauty, or the sublime, in situations rife with quotidian elements,

potentially rendering them moving and profound. Or, to bastardize Benjamin,

ambient art invites the spectator to contemplation; she can abandon herself to her

associations before it, opening a visually-discursive space ripe for the interaction of

multiple subjectivities and through which mundane technologies can be appropriated

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for visual pleasure.85

85 Benjamin’s actual words: “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eyes grasped a scene than it is already changes. It cannot be arrested.” “The Work of Art,” 238.

In Chapter 3, I will continue to explore this invitation to

contemplation as it leads to the formation of ambient communities a propos

television, a discussion I will frame by confronting the dichotomy between the

embodiment of private desire in public contexts and the production of public fictions

within the domestic/private sphere.